The present invention relates to the field of handwriting recognition systems and methods for handwriting recognition. More particularly, in one implementation, the present invention relates to recognition of on-line cursive handwriting for ideographies scripts.
The Chinese and Japanese languages use ideographies scripts, where there are several thousand characters. This large number of characters makes the entry by a typical computer keyboard of a character into a computer system cumbersome and slow. A more natural way of entering ideographies characters into a computer system would be to use handwriting recognition, and particularly automatic recognition of cursive style handwriting in a xe2x80x9con-linexe2x80x9d manner. However, prior on-line handwriting recognition methods have concentrated on print style handwritten ideographies characters; the requirement that the handwriting be printed is still too slow for a typical user of a computer system. These prior methods have not been successful at adapting to on-line cursive style handwriting character recognition.
The complexity of the ideographies characters and the character distortion due to non-linear shifting and multiple styles of writing also makes character recognition difficult, particularly for on-line systems.
one method which has been used extensively to deal with the types of problems arising from ideographies character recognition is hidden Markov modeling (HMM). HMMs can deal with the problems of segmentation, non-linear shifting and multiple representation of patterns and have been used extensively in speech and more recently character recognition. See, for example, K. Lee xe2x80x9cAutomatic Speech Recognition; The Development of The SPHINX Systemxe2x80x9d, Kluwer, Boston, 1989.; Nag, R., et al. xe2x80x9cScript Recognition Using Hidden Markov Modelsxe2x80x9d, Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, pp. 2071-2074, 1986; and Jeng, B., et al., xe2x80x9cOn The Use Of Discrete State Markov Process for Chinese Character Recognitionxe2x80x9d, SPIE, vol. 1360, Visual Communications and Image Processing xe2x80x290, pp. 1663-1670, (1990). Jeng used HMMs for off-line recognition of printed Chinese characters. In this system described by Jeng, one HMM is used for every Chinese character, and the HMMs are of fixed topology. The limitations of this approach are that the system can only recognize printed Chinese characters and not cursively written characters. This recognition system also requires a large amount of memory to store the thousands of character level Markov models. Another disadvantage of the system is that a fixed topology is used for every character and the number of states for a character""s hidden Markov model does not depend on the complexity of the character.
In ideographies languages, such as Chinese, the thousands of ideographies characters can be broken down into a smaller set of a few hundred subcharacters (also referred to as radicals). There are several well dictionaries which define recognized radicals in the various ideographies languages. Thus, the thousands of ideographies characters may be represented by a smaller subset of the subcharacters or radicals. See, Ng, T. M. and Low, H. B., xe2x80x9cSemiautomatic Decomposition and Partial Ordering of Chinese Radicalsxe2x80x9d, Proceedings of the International Conference on Chinese Computeing, pp. 250-254 (1988). Ng and Low designed a semiautomatic method for defining Chinese radicals. However, these radicals are not suitable for on-line handwriting character recognition using hidden Markov models for several reasons. First, to perform on-line character recognition using radical HMMs, a character model based on several radical HMMs should be formed from a time sequence of subcharacters, which was not done by Ng and Low. Secondly, Ng and Low break down the characters into four basic constructs or categories of radicals; vertical division; horizontal division; encapsulation and superimposition, and a radical as defined by Ng and Low can appear in more than one of these categories. This has the effect of having up to four different shapes and sizes for the radical and this will have a detrimental effect on the hidden Markov modeling accuracy because the model has to deal with up to four different basic patterns for the four categories.
While the use of subcharacters or radicals to recognize ideographies characters is in some ways desirable, it does not always accurately recognize characters without also recognizing the geometric layout of the subcharacters relative to each other in a character. In a prior approach by Lyon, the use of a size and placement model for subcharacters in a ideographies script has been suggested. See, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/315,886, filed Sep. 30, 1994 by Richard F. Lyon, entitled xe2x80x9cSystem and Method for Word Recognition Using Size and Placement Models.xe2x80x9d This method uses the relationship between sequential pairs of subcharacters in a character to create a size and placement model. The subcharacter pair models are created by finding the covariance between bounding box features of subcharacter pairs. This method relies on the pen lift which occurs between subcharacters of ideographies characters and thus is only useful for printed ideographies characters and cannot be used for cursively written ideographies characters where there is usually no pen lift between characters.
Thus the prior art while providing certain benefits for handwriting recognition does not efficiently recognize cursively written ideographies characters in an on-line manner (for example, in an interactive manner). Moreover, the use of an HMM for a radical having various categories has a detrimental effect upon the accuracy of the HMM procedures. Thus it is desirable to provide improved on-line recognition of cursive handwriting for ideographies scripts.
The present invention, in one embodiment, creates an on-line handwriting recognition system for ideographies characters based on subcharacter hidden Markov models (HMMs) that can successfully recognize cursive and print style handwriting. The ideographies characters are modeled using a sequence of subcharacter models (HMMS) and they are also modeled by using the two dimensional geometric layout of the subcharacters within a character. The system includes, in one embodiment, both recognition of radical sequence and recognition of geometric layout of radicals within a character. The subcharacter HMMs are created by following a set of design rules. The combination of the sequence recognition and the geometric layout recognition of the subcharacter models is used to recognize the handwritten character. Various embodiments of the present invention are described below.
In one embodiment of the present invention, a method of recognizing a handwritten character includes the steps of comparing a handwritten input to a first model of a first portion of the handwritten character and comparing the handwritten input to a second model of a second portion of the character, where the second portion of the character has been defined in a model to follow in time the first portion. In a typical embodiment, the first model is a first hidden Markov model and the second model is a second hidden Markov model where the second model is defined to follow the first model in time; typically the first model is processed (e.g. by a Viterbi algorithm) in the system before the second model such that the system can automatically segment the first portion of the character from the second portion of the character, which is useful in the geometric layout recognition of the present invention. In a typical example, the first portion will include a first portion of a recognized radical and the second portion will include a second portion of the same recognized radical, where the first portion is normally written first and then at least another portion of another recognized radical is written and then finally the second portion is written. In this manner, the radical HMMs re separated and ordered to preserve the time sequence of the manner in which the radicals are written. It will be appreciated that the number of radicals per character vary from one to many (e.g. up to 10 radicals per character).
According to another aspect of the present invention, a method of the present invention for recognizing a handwritten character includes the steps of comparing a first geometric feature of a first portion of a character to be recognized to a first geometric model of the first portion, and comparing a second geometric feature of a second portion of a character to a first geometric model of the first portion. In a typical embodiment, this process of recognizing the layout of the radicals of a character is performed in conjunction with the recognition of the time sequence of the radicals of the character. Typically, the recognition of the time sequence of radicals provides the segmentation of the handwritten character by use of a Viterbi search through a lexical tree of hidden Markov models, which include models of the first and second radicals. This segmentation allows the layout recognition system to selectively obtain a geometric feature of a first portion of a character which is then used to compare to a geometric model of the first portion as well as other portions of geometrically trained and modeled radicals in the system.
The present invention comprises various methods and systems for defining the databases and dictionaries which are used in the handwriting recognition processes of the present invention. According to one aspect of the present invention, a method of creating a database of radicals for use in a handwriting recognition procedure is provided. This method includes storing a first model in a computer readable storage medium for a first portion of the character to be recognized, and storing a second model in the computer readable storage medium for a second portion of the character, wherein the first portion comprises a first portion of a recognized radical and a second portion comprises a second portion of the same recognized radical, where the first portion is normally written first and then at least another portion of another recognized radical is written and finally the second portion is written. While this increases the storage requirements for storing the radicals because several radicals may be created from a single recognized radical, recognition of radical sequence is now permissible according to the present invention.
According to another method of the present invention for creating a database of radicals for use in handwriting recognition, a method includes the steps of storing the first model in a computer readable storage medium for a first recognized radical and storing a second model in a computer readable storage medium for the first recognized radical, where the first recognized radical has different shapes depending on the use of the first recognized radical in a category (e.g. horizontal division or vertical division). While this method increases the storage requirements of a database according to the present invention, it does improve the accuracy of the HMM techniques used according to the present invention.
Various systems are also described in accordance with the present invention. In a typical example, a system of the present invention includes a handwriting input tablet for inputting handwritten characters. This tablet is typically coupled to a bus which receives the input of the handwritten character from the tablet. Typically, a processor is coupled to this bus and a memory is also coupled to this bus. The memory stores the various databases and computer programs described according to the present invention. In a typical embodiment, the memory stores a first model of a first portion of a character to be recognized and stores a second model of a second portion of the character, where the memory stores the second model such that the second model is defined to follow in time the first model. Typically, the processor will perform the recognition procedures through a lexical tree of HMMs stored in the memory using a Viterbi algorithm and will perform the recognition on the first model before proceeding to the hidden Markov states of the second model.
Various systems of the present invention may be implemented, including a system in auxiliary hardware which may reside in a printed circuit board card in an expansion slot of a computer system. Alternatively, the present invention may be practiced substantially in software by storing the necessary databases, data and computer programs in a general purpose memory and/or computer readable media (e.g. hard disk) which is a main memory of a computer system. This main memory is coupled to a processor which is the main processor of the computer system so that the processor may execute the computer programs stored in the memory in order to operate on the data and the databases stored in the memory to perform in the handwriting character recognition according to the present invention.
The present invention also includes computer readable storage media (e.g. a hard disk, optical disk, etc.) which store executable computer programs and data which are used to perform the handwriting recognition processes according to the present invention. This storage media typically loads (through control of the processor) a system memory (e.g. DRAM) with the computer programs and databases which are used for the handwriting recognition.